Letter by Chad Landrum

At the request of the Pelican Bay’s CMO (Chief Medical Officer), who made a call down here in advance, I was singled out for discriminatory treatment immediately upon our arrival [at Corcoran]. I was further isolated, even from all other comrades, of which I have since been effectively “extraordinarily rendered” and lost down one of these long hospital corridors. My circumstances have since retained continuity, and aside from receiving your letter, I’ve heard, and know, of nothing concerning our circumstances [with respect to the Hunger Strike].
I recently broke my own hunger strike after I began experiencing an episode of encephalopathy which was well on its way to incapacitating me, both physically and mentally. Had I not been in a psychologically compromised state, upon my recovery, I should have continued my course. On the other hand, I knew that this second round of the hunger strike hadn’t retained the degree of momentum that we had generated around the first hunger strike. In a nutshell, it was insufficiently planned and executed. Our message and goals not only need to be more concise and reach the prison masses directly; they need to be inclusive of them and their interests beyond the validation process.
When the conditions are right and complement one another both subjectively and objectively, there exists the dialectical unity necessary to facilitate the further progression of our struggle, and when the time for martyrs descends down upon us, I am convinced that the love and compassion I retain for the convict masses and all oppressed gente, will be equally matched with the quantity of discipline necessary to do what’s correct, morally and in correspondence with objective necessity, so that others may live. Not simply as living and breathing empty biological vessels, for this alone is not too little, but to live as the social beings who we are.
For human beings, social intercourse and all of its manifestations are as much of a requirement to define life as oxygen is to sustain it. To the puerco’s (pigs) a sentence of perpetual isolation behind the pseudo‐justified validation process is nothing less than a means of perpetuating their economic self‐interest. For those of us unfortunate enough to land in these tombs, it is a psychological death sentence to be carried out forthwith by the slow strangulation of our social intercourse, the social oxygen required for the development of the human species and our personalities—that which gives each individual of the collective a distinct identity. The dialectical connection between the individual and the collective is a connection of interdependence and inseparability. For the collective is the group expression of the totality of the multitude of individualities, and likewise, each individual is a manifestation of the collective, contradictions and all, that gives shape to our individual identities.
To subjugate one of the total deprivation of social intercourse is to artificially separate the individual from the collective, thus subjecting one to a slow torturous process of “social extermination”, which when carried out under sanitized conditions is not so apparently conspicuous to those self‐proclaimed defenders of humanity who might notice otherwise, or who choose not to, where we strung up by our wrists and being electrocuted. Instead, under the refined forms of sensory deprivation, it is a quieter and subtler method in its form, but with essentially the same socially incapacitating and deadly consequences that reduces the once social being to a dehumanized state of existence tantamount to a social lobotomy. The most extroverted individual will turn inwards psychologically, eventually becoming socially incapacitated and incapable of forming any social bonds despite one’s instincts and inner desire to do just the opposite to, connect with others both physically and emotionally—to have human contact.

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